The Lost Angel

by Sierra, Javier

  “Martin!”

  I instantly got a knot in my throat. Martin, dressed in a red overcoat and white turtleneck, tried to smile as he rappelled down the opening.

  “Julia! You’re here!”

  Before I could catch my breath, his arms were wrapped around me, and he was spinning me around in a dizzying, loving whirlwind.

  “Martin . . . I . . .” I loosened his grip on me. “I need to know what’s going on.”

  “Oh, you will, my love, you will!”

  This Martin didn’t look anything like the one from the supposed kidnapping video. He was elated, strong and bursting with life. There was no sign that he’d ever been held captive.

  “My love, I hope you can forgive me for all this,” he said, whispering into my ear as he gently placed me back on the ground. “Just when I needed you, here you are.”

  A flood of emotions rushed to my chest, like an eruption of molten lava that made my eyes sting. I tried to breathe, to hold back the tears. But it wasn’t easy, not after finally seeing the man to whom I’d pledged my love and devotion, his eyes twinkling from beyond his strong square jaw and that wavy blond hair. Oh, God . . . This man, this man who I loved . . . This man who deceived me . . . This man who now, even at this moment, was asking me to help him.

  “I . . . I don’t even know who you are, Martin,” I stammered. “Don’t you understand? I have no idea who you are!” I sobbed, the pressure in my chest building.

  Martin leaned in close to me. “I’ve tried to tell you since the day we met, but I was always afraid to tell you everything.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “I know you don’t. Not right now you don’t. But you will, my love. Even though you might not trust me right now, I promise you’ll understand everything.”

  Martin reached out and stroked my hair, gently resting his hand on the crook of my neck.

  “After all the incredible things we’ve seen together, all the things that defy reason, you still have this internal conflict, this battle between logic and faith. And I’m telling you that it’s time to let go of all your doubt, my love. Right now, more than ever, Julia, I need you to believe in yourself—and to help save us all.”

  “To . . . save us?”

  Martin’s deep blue eyes stared into mine. They glowed with an emotion I’d never seen there before. I’d have sworn it was fear. And for a moment, I was able to sense his terror. Truly feel it.

  “Julia, as we speak, a massive explosion of solar plasma is headed our way. In just a few hours, it’ll smash into Earth and cause the kind of global catastrophe our world hasn’t seen since the time of Noah. Except this time, there’ll be no escape. There’s no ark, no gods coming to our rescue . . .”

  I could see Martin struggling to find the words to continue.

  “When that invisible solar cloud punctures our atmosphere and makes landfall, it’ll affect the very balance of Earth’s core. It will cause earthquakes across the globe, destroy all of the planet’s electrical networks, disrupt the very DNA of every species on Earth and cause even inactive volcanoes, such as this one, to erupt again, darkening the sky for decades to come. It is, without a doubt, that great and terrible day described in the Bible, Julia.”

  The terror in his voice shook me to the core, and I grabbed his arms. I felt my nails dig into his coat desperately. “And . . . there’s . . . nothing we can do about it?”

  Bill Faber pounded his cane on the floor. The crack made Ellen Watson jump. Sheila, Daniel and Dujok hung their heads silently.

  “There’s only one hope, young lady. You must activate the adamants to help us communicate with God.”

  “You think God will stop the solar storm?”

  “God is just a metaphor, Julia,” Martin said. “A symbol for the underlying force in the universe, the energy that—if we can control it—could help us counter the rain of solar plasma headed our way.”

  “But how am I supposed to talk to God?”

  The elder Faber gave me a serious look—and a tall order. “It’s just like praying, Julia. You haven’t forgotten how to pray, have you?”

  94

  One of the Oval Office’s emergency lines rang just as Roger Castle was reaching for the phone.

  The president was about to call the director of the NSA. The first wave of data from the STEREO space probes was on his desk, urging him to take action. “STEREO has calculated that the first wave—two billion tons of high-energy protons—will impact Earth’s Northern Hemisphere,” read the e-mail from the Goddard Space Flight Center’s control room. “Ground Zero will be the thirty-seven million acres between Turkey and the Caucasus republics. Impact should take place within forty-eight to seventy-two hours.” The e-mail added: “We recommend alerting the United Nations and NATO’s Supreme Allied Command to take all electrical and communications systems in this region offline until the storm has passed. We also recommend moving our satellites as far as possible from the impact zone.”

  “Yes?” Roger Castle abruptly answered the phone.

  “It’s Bollinger, Mr. President.”

  “Andy! Have you seen the news from Goddard?”

  “That’s actually why I’m calling. This storm isn’t like any of the others. Someone caused it, Mr. President.”

  The line went silent.

  “I’m sure about this, Roger,” Bollinger said. “Our equipment tracked the electromagnetic signature of those stones you’re looking for and traced where it was sending those category-X emissions: the sun.”

  “Andy . . . are you sure?”

  “Positive. They weren’t aimed at some far-off planet. And they weren’t just aimed at the sun in general, either. They specifically targeted Sunspot 13057. And that’s the very spot that’s just erupted.”

  The president waited for another moment of silence to pass. He knew his friend had more to say.

  “But I’m also calling to tell you,” he finally said, “that I think Goddard’s calculations about the intensity of this storm are wrong.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The STEREO probes classified the eruption as a class X23. Class X23, Roger! There’s no precedent for that.”

  “X23? Help me out here, Andy.”

  “Mr. President, solar flares are classified as C for minor eruptions, M for moderate ones and X for the strongest ones. The one that plunged half of Canada into darkness in 1989 was a Class X19 emission, and it was the highest one we’ve ever recorded to date. This one is four orders of magnitude higher! We’re not talking about some pretty aurora borealis over Florida or even a few million new cases of skin cancer . . .”

  “What’s this mean, Andy?”

  “I’ve made a couple of inquiries, Roger. I’ve searched the archives of the Air Force Weather Reconnaissance Squadron in Colorado Springs, and I spoke with several climatologists I trust. And it all points to the same thing,” Bollinger said, and this time, his tone was even graver. “The last time solar activity hit a peak, in 2005, we caught only a glancing blow from the solar storms and still it was enough to warm the Gulf Stream and bring about the worst hurricane season in more than a century. Remember Katrina?”

  The president held the phone to his ear and said nothing.

  “That solar eruption came from a single sunspot, number 720, we believe. Well, I’ve taken another look at that data, and, Roger, the news isn’t good. That eruption was only a class X7, about the size of the planet Jupiter.”

  “So what does that mean for us?”

  “How long did Goddard say it would take the proton storm to hit Earth?”

  “Between two and three days.”

  Andrew Bollinger sighed into the receiver. “That’s the standard amount of time we use. But in 2005, for some reason we haven’t been able to determine, the blast from number 720 hit us . . . after just thirty minutes. Thirty minutes, Roger! Instead of traveling somewhere between six hundred and twelve hundred miles per second, that thing moved at forty-six thousand miles a second. We
’re talking about a quarter of the speed of light! My God, Roger. That mass might be on top of us any minute!”

  “As far as we know, it’s not supposed to hit the United States,” Castle said, no less worried. “But it is going to hit one of the Allied countries—”

  “Let me guess: Turkey.”

  “Right.”

  “That’s because the coronal mass ejection is following the signal from the stones. They’re acting like a homing beacon. God only knows what’ll happen when the two meet . . .”

  “Andy, what do we do?”

  But that unexpected question from the leader of the free world was beyond Bollinger’s knowledge. “There’s not much we can do, Mr. President. Just watch. And pray.”

  95

  “So what do we know about the symbols?” I asked.

  We’d all huddled around the warm lab to figure out our next step. At fifteen thousand feet, with the icy wind pounding the glacier outside and finding its way through the cracks until it hummed like a pipe organ, I figured it was better to work together. Even with Martin. The loquacious Daniel Knight, who’d found a warm spot next to the generator, was the first to offer what he knew.

  “You mean the symbols on the Ark? We think they’re part of our ancestors’ angelic language,” he said.

  “And do you know the meaning of the symbols, Daniel?”

  “Unfortunately, we’ve lost whatever their meaning is over the millennia. In fact, until John Dee came along, no one had been able to interpret or even order them. Thanks to the stones and those on the ‘other side,’ he was able to receive the complete alphabet.”

  “Back to John Dee?”

  “It was Dee who classified the symbols and named the language Enochian. Enoch only learned how to speak a rudimentary form of this language after being taken to the heavens in a kind of magnetic windstorm that occurs in this region, something we call the Glory of God. The epicenter of the phenomenon is in the Hallaç crater, although the storm has been known to occur in a thirty-mile radius. And that includes where we are now.”

  “As Enoch and Dee discovered, activating the adamants is all based on hitting the frequency that will resonate with their atomic structure,” Bill Faber said.

  “How are you all so sure they’ll actually work?” I asked, looking at each of them.

  “Because I’ve seen that force in action, Julia,” Martin said. “I was with Artemi in these very mountains. And when the Glory of God decides to awaken, it can be a frightening experience.”

  “And yet, it’s not powerful enough for what we need,” Bill Faber said, shaking his head. “That ship was in constant contact with God during its voyage. Somehow, it managed a continuous connection with the other side and held it at a time when Earth’s magnetic field was hit by an enormous energy strike similar to the one that’s on the way.”

  “I can’t speak Eno—whatever it’s called. Not even a word! But all of you seem to know everything about it . . . ,” I said, exasperated.

  Bill Faber tapped the ground a couple of times with his cane. “There’s no need to lose our temper . . . What we need from you is very simple: Just stand in front of the Ark holding the adamants and pronounce the name of God. Actually, you won’t even have to speak it . . .”

  “And how’s that going to work?”

  “We’ve got a sophisticated piece of equipment that can read the electrical impulses in the language centers of your brain and turn them into sound. It works like a neural scanner. Of course, it won’t work while you’re in your normal state of consciousness. Still, if we manage to get your brain waves to reach the delta frequency, between one and forty hertz—which only manifest during a trance—we should be able to achieve the results we need.”

  I couldn’t help feeling like a lab rat again.

  “So what makes you think this is going to work, Mr. Faber?”

  “Simple,” he said. “The medium John Dee used to communicate with the angels in the sixteenth century, Edward Kelly was able to pronounce words perfectly in Enochian countless times. And each time he did it with the help of the three items we have here today: the two adamants and the invocation tablet. The combination of their electromagnetic fields is what will amplify your gift. The adamants and the neural sounds your mind will make will play as a single instrument.”

  “I’ll be like the Amrak.”

  “In a basic sense, yes.” He nodded. “That’s why we feel it’ll work.”

  “Will it hurt me?”

  “Dee’s mediums always came away unharmed—”

  “But they never tried what you want to try, did they?”

  Bill Faber looked at me tenderly. “You have no reason to fear, my dear. You’re surrounded by angels.”

  “Oh, right. I almost forgot . . .”

  “Julia, the time is now. We need to get started right away.”

  96

  Tom Jenkins dug his fingers into the snow and lugged his body forward to the edge of the precipice.

  He knew just one wrong move could do more than endanger the mission—it could send him hurtling thirty feet to the bottom of the cavern. Out of habit, he checked his satellite phone once more and again he found it without a signal.

  That’s it. We’re on our own now . . .

  From this vantage point, he had a perfect view of everything inside the ice cave. He felt like he was a dove, looking down through the oculus in Rome’s Pantheon. So he carefully settled himself as best he could, set his binoculars on a small tripod and got ready to watch the show. There was no need to rush now. He knew Nick Allen had his back, and most important, they had the element of surprise. If he played his cards right, he’d be out of there soon with his coworker, the Fabers and the two stones that the president himself had ordered secured.

  Now he just had to find a way to let Ellen Watson know that the cavalry had arrived. But how to do it?

  Watson looked petrified. He could spot that figure anywhere, despite her being bundled in thermals. She was watching Artemi Dujok and a young man in a red jumpsuit help Julia Álvarez onto a gurney and wheel her toward the lab. Ellen didn’t look like she was getting ready to make a move.

  “See that?” Allen whispered, pointing to a metal locker some eight to ten feet left of Ellen Watson. “I think that’s the weapons locker.”

  Tom nodded but was distracted. There was something off about Ellen’s body language, but he couldn’t put his finger on it.

  “If we could get our hands on some weapons, we could take control of the situation. It’s six against two, but they’re distracted.”

  Jenkins absentmindedly bit his lip.

  While the two soldiers plotted their next step, things were taking shape down in the lab. A timer displayed on a fifty-inch flat-screen counted down the time remaining before the first wave of plasma blasted Earth. NASA had recalculated the speed of the tsunami several times thanks to Andrew Bollinger’s findings—and Faber’s equipment had intercepted the figures thanks to an antenna he’d placed just outside the roof of the glacier.

  Twenty minutes, forty seconds . . .

  The clock counted down the time until the high-energy protons made contact with the ionosphere, when all radio communications in the Northern Hemisphere would be lost.

  My goddamn satphone got an early start, Jenkins lamented. The Iridium satellites must already have been affected.

  The timer continued to count down. Dujok and the older Faber kept a close eye on it. Meanwhile, Sheila, Daniel and Martin surrounded Julia. They held her hands while one of the Armenian henchmen strapped her down and placed a helmet with all sorts of cables coming out of it on her head. He went around, checking all the connections.

  “What the hell are they doing?” Jenkins mumbled, trying to zoom the binoculars in farther.

  He watched as they wheeled Julia toward one of the glacier’s walls. There, on some kind of platform, the invocation tablet and the adamants were waiting.

  “There they are!” Jenkins said in a loud whisper.
>
  The adamants had begun to glow ever so slightly, a pulsating shimmer that Allen watched nervously.

  “Julia, try to relax,” Allen and Jenkins heard the older man say clearly. Thanks to the acoustics of the icy cavern below, their voices rebounded and could be heard with crystal clarity.

  “Relax? With these harnesses all over me?” Julia shot back.

  “It’s for your own safety, Julia,” Martin said, trying to calm her. “We don’t know just how powerful your mind will be under the circumstances. You know we’d never let anything happen to you.”

  “Remember what happened to you in Noia when the Amrak surrounded you in its magnetic field?” Dujok said. “You could’ve broken your neck when you fainted . . .”

  The older Faber rushed toward them. “The impact will happen in exactly eighteen minutes,” he said. “We should get started.”

  “But how do you know? That this is the moment? That this is the ‘great and terrible day’?” Julia asked.

  Daniel Knight stepped close to Julia. He carried a pen and a briefcase under his arm as if he were ready for just such a question. He pointed at something on the wall.

  “John Dee predicted it all in Monas hieroglyphica, love,” he said, blinking beneath the floodlights in the lab. “He drew a symbol in the book that, as a matter of fact, is also engraved on the Ark.”

  “You mean John Dee was here?”

  “No. Well, at least we don’t think so,” he answered. “We know Dee traveled throughout Europe. But there’s no evidence that he ever came to Turkey, much less a place as remote as this one.”

  “So how did he know about this symbol?”

  “Until the 1840 earthquake that demolished most of the mountain’s north face, pilgrimages to the Ark were common among the locals. Probably one of the pilgrims who journeyed to Ararat showed it to him. We do know that this is the oldest representation of the symbol.”

  “And you think the symbol contains some kind of prophecy, Daniel?”